An Indian-born Australian citizen has been sentenced to nine years in jail by a South African court for fire-bombing the family home of a woman he was obsessed with after trying to hire a hitman to kill her father.

Media described Shumsheer Singh Ghumman as a high-flyer former London City Fund manager. The South African court heard that 33-year-old Ghumman developed an obsession with Hannah Rhind,30,when she was working as a PR executive for a pharmaceutical firm in London,the Daily Mail reported.

Ghumman offered to pay a gangster £850 to kill Philip Rhind,an oil firm executive. But the hitman pulled out of the deal,prompting Ghumman to try to complete the job himself by throwing Molotov cocktails at the Rhind familys villa in Cape Town.